Epic Struggles

History lives and breathes—it's never static. Debates about history always tell us as much about the present and the struggles for power as about the past, often more so. As George Orwell famously pointed out: "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future."

Poland is once again getting a reminder of that. Former prime minister Jarosław Kaczyński is banking on history to revive his right-wing party's political fortunes in the upcoming elections for the European Parliament. By demanding a tougher stance against what he portrays as a push by German politicians to equate German suffering at the end of World War II with Polish suffering, he wants voters to see him as the defender of the country's interests. Polish voters will decide whether this is a defense of historical truths or just a campaign ploy, but it's already clear that this isn't the kind of epic struggle over history that took place during the communist era.

In fact, Poles would do better to look further afield for today's truly intense battles over history. Not surprisingly, one is taking place right next door—in Russia. Another is taking place across the Atlantic, in the United States. How these two countries are wrestling with their recent past is a revealing indicator of where they are politically right now—and where they may be going.

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev issued a decree recently ordering "the creation of a presidential commission to counter attempts to harm Russian interests by falsifying history." The commission is supposed to be stacked with government officials, including from the Defense Ministry and the Federal Security Service, and there will be only three historians among its members. Orwell's ears would perk right up at that news. For those who have been hoping that Medvedev would tolerate more dissent than Vladimir Putin has, all this is profoundly discouraging.

But there are a few signs that this doesn't have to mean a return to Soviet-style wholesale falsification of history. First, some historians are already raising their voices in protest. Alexei Miller, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told the weekly Expert that he hopes the commission will be "stillborn." In the Soviet era, such heresy would not have been tolerated. While the subservient Russian media has rallied around the commission and talked about the attempts to "blacken" Russia's image, Mikhail Gorbachev—the father of glasnost—left little doubt that he sees the commission as a step backward. So long as such voices can be heard, the battle over history will continue.

And nowhere has that battle been more tortuous in Russia. When I was reporting from the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, I often quoted the Soviet adage: "How can you predict the future of a country with an unpredictable past?" While the official versions of history were decreed from above, they kept changing: Stalin was a great leader, then Khrushchev debunked him, then Brezhnev debunked Khrushchev … and so on.

In many ways, the glasnost era was the most confusing period of all. Traveling by train in 1989 in what was then still the Soviet Ukraine, I met a young history teacher. She commiserated with me about the lack of teaching materials. The previous textbooks had been jettisoned because of their blatant falsifications, but no new ones were available yet. "I don't know what to teach my students," she said. "I'd like to say glasnost and perestroika are wonderful and all this will work, but who knows if in 10 years I won't be condemned for propagating lies? "